This invention relates to a telecommunications system for automatically creating, loading, modifying and/or checking recorded audio announcements at a plurality of remotely located playback devices from a central location.
In large telephone networks recorded voice announcements are used by playback devices to provide information messages on network events, such as wrong numbers and failures in the network, and for interactive services such as voice mail boxes and bill paying, and use of network services, such as call diversion.
Each playback device has a specific method of loading the required announcements. Many playback devices use direct voice recordal, some use recorded data files and others require a change to a hardware device such as an EPROM (Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory). A telephone network may include a large number of geographically dispersed playback devices belonging to a plurality of vendors providing different telephonic services. Therefore, a large number of different announcements may be required to be loaded into an even larger number of geographically dispersed playback devices. Currently, it is necessary for the announcements, which may be recorded by a voice artist or artificially generated, to be physically loaded individually into each playback device, and with a large number of different announcements required for an even larger number of geographically dispersed playback devices for multi-vendors, it can be a very laborious process to load the announcements for all the playback devices, and a long and difficult process to make changes or additions to some or all of the recorded announcements.
It is therefore desirable to provide an improved system for loading and/or modifying a plurality of audio announcements in a plurality of playback devices at geographically dispersed locations.
It is also desirable to provide a system for rapidly creating new recorded announcements and loading the new announcements into remotely located playback devices.
According to one aspect of the invention there is provided a telecommunications system including a plurality of remotely located playback devices belonging to a plurality of different vendors providing different telephonic services in a telephone network, wherein said system includes a central control and management station adapted to automatically load and/or modify recorded announcements in the plurality of remotely located playback devices of the different vendors, said station including:
announcement storage means for storing a plurality of recorded announcements;
access storage means including access details for each of the remotely located playback devices of said plurality of different vendors;
a management means adapted to receive requests from a vendor to load or modify a recorded announcement in at least one of said remotely located playback devices of said vendor; and
control means adapted to send the requested recorded announcement to said at least one remotely located playback device of said vendor via the telephone network for loading in said at least one remotely located playback device.
Preferably, the access storage means includes machine identification details and access instructions for each of the plurality of remotely located playback devices, and the recorded announcements are sent to the remotely located playback devices by the control means using the machine identification details and the access instructions.
The central control and management station preferably includes a plurality of loading interfaces for communicating with the plurality of remotely located playback devices via different communication means or protocols.
Preferably, the access storage means includes a vendor database containing vendor identification details relating to the different vendors offering recorded announcement services in the telephone network, and access details relating to the communication means or protocols used to access each vendors playback machines.
The recorded announcements to be loaded into the remotely located playback devices are preferably voice announcements for use in a wide variety of applications such as voice mail, interactive voice response, e.g. for paying of bills by telephone, and recorded information services, particularly those which are required to be updated at frequent intervals, e.g. weather reports and stock market information services. It will, however, be appreciated that the term xe2x80x9crecorded announcementsxe2x80x9d in the present invention may encompass other types of recorded audio xe2x80x9cannouncementsxe2x80x9d such as hold music and series of tones recognizable by deaf or partially deaf people.
The recorded announcements are preferably stored in digital form and may be produced by a number of different methods, such as by digital voice recording or by text to speech conversion processes.
The recorded announcements at the central control and management station may be added to or modified at any time, so that recorded announcements loaded into the remotely located playback devices may be modified at any time under the control of the central control and management system. It is therefore a relatively easy task to load and/or modify recorded announcements at one or more of the remotely located playback devices via the telephone network from the central control and management system as compared with the laborious task of physically loading audio announcements into a large number of playback devices at geographically dispersed locations.
The present invention is particularly advantageous when it is required to load or modify the same recorded announcement at a plurality of playback devices at different remote locations. Further, recorded announcements for different vendors providing different services in the telephone network can be loaded and/or modified in their remotely located playback devices from a common central control and management station.
According to another aspect of the invention there is provided a telecommunications system for automatically creating and loading or modifying recorded announcements in a plurality of remotely located playback devices in a telephone network, said system including a central control and management station including:
announcement storage means for storing a plurality of recorded announcements;
access storage means including access details for each of said remotely located playback devices;
management means adapted to receive requests to load or modify a recorded announcement in at least one of said remotely located playback devices; and
control means adapted to send the requested recorded announcement to said at least one remotely located playback device;
wherein the system includes announcement generating means for creating new announcements for storage in said announcement storage means; and
the management means is programmed to check whether the requested announcement is present in the announcement storage means and, if the requested announcement is not present, the system is arranged to create a new announcement automatically for storage in the announcement storage means.
The recorded announcement generating means may include a digital voice recording means for recording voice announcements in digital form. Alternatively or additionally, the recorded announcement generating means may include a text to speech converter which is able to convert text, produced from a computer or keyboard into voice announcements in digital form which can subsequently be played back by the remotely located playback devices.
The announcement storage means preferably comprises a recorded voice announcement library for storing recorded voice announcements in digital voice files, and the management means preferably includes a recorded voice announcement index containing an entry for each voice file in the recorded voice announcement library.
According to a further aspect of the invention there is provided a telecommunications system for automatically loading and checking recorded announcements in a plurality of remotely located playback devices in a telephone network, said system including a central control and management station including:
announcement storage means for storing a plurality of recorded announcements;
access storage means including access details for each of said remotely located playback devices;
management means adapted to receive requests to load or modify the recorded announcement in at least one of said remotely located playback devices;
control means adapted to send the requested recorded announcement to said at least one remotely located playback device; and
verification means adapted to verify that the requested recorded announcement has been correctly loaded into said at least one remotely located playback device.
The central control and management system may also include speech recognition means which can be used to check that a remotely located playback device has correctly loaded a recorded voice announcement. For this purpose the control means is arranged to instruct the remotely located playback device to play back the recorded voice announcement after loading.